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Cars (all fuels and electric)

In my view, on the pollution front electric vehicles have two advantages:

  • “Gases resulting from burning hydrocarbons” emission is moved away from our immediate vicinity to the site of the power plant. Better for our health, even if maybe not better globally for the planet.
  • It centralises the power production, and allows the country / continent to gradually move away from burning hydrocarbons by replacing tens (hundreds?) of power plants instead of millions of cars.

Whether that is worth the level of subsidisation that they get is another discussion altogether.

I don’t know whether the efficiency gain at the “big power plant” compared to the ICE car engine outstrips the transfer losses or not, so I don’t say anything neither in one direction nor the other.

On some fundamental level, I was always had a positive outlook towards the likes of alcohol (in “spark plug ignition” engines) and raw vegetable oil (in diesel engines) as fuel. On a “big scale” level, I fail to understand/accept the counter-arguments like “competes with food production”; to me they sound too much like “finish your plate, other children are hungry”.

  • We literally pay our farmers to reduce their production. In the grand scheme of things, that production capacity could make fuel for our cars?
  • We have lived through a period where … what was it? One third? Two thirds? I don’t remember exactly … of our food production was burned for transport. Just it wasn’t at 1000 K in a metal piston, it was at 310 K in the stomach and mitochondria of horses. What would be so fundamentally different if we went back in that direction?
Last Edited by lionel at 10 Aug 17:07
ELLX

Brazilian alcohol powered cars and Flex Fuel Vehicles.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 10 Aug 17:16

lionel wrote:

We have lived through a period where … what was it? One third? Two thirds? I don’t remember exactly … of our food production was burned for transport. Just it wasn’t at 1000 K in a metal piston, it was at 310 K in the stomach and mitochondria of horses. What would be so fundamentally different if we went back in that direction?

Population now = 7.8 billion rather than 2 billion then.

Pavel wrote:

We shall also know that every electric thing, including electric cars, gets 62% of energy by burning fossil fuels, 10% from nuclear, 15% water, 13% renewables.

That might be correct as a word average, but for each individual it depends very much on where you live.

Against CO2? EVs are scam, see above.

Not necessarily, see above.

But most importantly, EVs have the potential of (economically) using entirely CO2-free energy sources. Internal combustion engines do not.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

lionel wrote:

On some fundamental level, I was always had a positive outlook towards the likes of alcohol (in “spark plug ignition” engines) and raw vegetable oil (in diesel engines) as fuel. On a “big scale” level, I fail to understand/accept the counter-arguments like “competes with food production”; to me they sound too much like “finish your plate, other children are hungry”.

The land can only tolerate so much farming, this is why you need to rotate crops and leave fields fallow or you’re farming unsustainably.

Also the EROEI of bioethanol is terrible (EROEI – energy returned on energy invested). It’s debatable whether ethanol from corn has an EROEI exceeding 1 (some figures I was able to look up show it as just 1.04, meaning you transport it a little bit and it’s gone below 1), meaning you’re literally throwing energy away. That’s fine if the ethanol is just an additive or a product for some industrial process, not fine if you want a fuel. Other sources of bioethanol are better (e.g. sugar cane is about 1.7) but it’s still not good.

There are also nearly 8bn people on the planet now, with grain supply being crimped by a war in a big grain producing country.

Andreas IOM

It’s simple really.

Nuclear is the only way to go.

Until they develop fusion, and then nuclear will be even more the only way to go

Putin should get a Nobel prize for energy awareness education. He still needs to do more work in some countries, unfortunately…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Nuclear is the only way to go

I come to similar conclusion and it was a reality shock but it’s hard to say this ‘simple truth’?

The revelation was when doing an internship in one power station in Normandie, something that delivered 2500MW of ‘clean energy’ all year along flawlessly whil nearby wind farm that barely give 1MW for each turbine in windy days was a nightmare to maintain (I had access to their maintenance data, zillions burned or damaged)

PS: that summer ‘Greenpeace’ invaded the nuclear power station, they even landed a helicopter on the roof of another one nearby and were two inches from entering control rooms…I was always puzzled by limited understanding of physics and chemistry from those guys when it comes to CO2 emessions? I never understood, why they did not go after fossil fuel power station in Mantes La Jolie? the majority of the protesters don’t even have a descent education to start with

Last Edited by Ibra at 11 Aug 11:01
Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

There was never an upper bound on stupidity of those movements. The problem is that in any volunteer organisation it is really hard to find energetic volunteers, so you have to get everybody on board and hopefully some of them won’t completely wreck the place. One sees that in GA organisations too!

One thing is for sure though: they would be very safe handling weapons. They only ever shoot themselves in their feet.

But, as the saying goes, never waste a good crisis, so I propose that Nobel prize for Putin in addressing this issue. This chance won’t come back for another, ahem, couple of years.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

We can debate the merits or not of electric cars, but in the end they are here to stay and the ICE is dead. It’s just a matter of time.

Even if they were just as polluting as ICE, it at least moves the emissions to a place away from the population centre.

But even ignoring emissions altogether:

- They are quieter to drive (ICE luxury car quietness right down to the cheapest, most basic electric car)
- They are faster and more fun to drive (particularly acceleration which is what is the most “fun” factor of driving fast).
- Fuel costs is much cheaper than ICE
- Fuel potentially available from your home solar panels if you live somewhere sunny
- They require much less maintenance
- They (should) be more reliable than ICE as they have much fewer moving parts and don’t operate with such a temperature gradient (though I’m not sure if failure is as predictable as ICE. That is, can you see when an electric motor is going to fail and do something about it before it happens, in the same way you can for ICE??)
- And who would want to go to a filling station again and waste 10 minutes of your life every week when you could just walk out to your car in the morning and drive, knowing that it’s already fuel of fuel. Personally, never having to go to another filling station again (except on unusually long journeys for me) would be reason enough for an electric car!

Perhaps Hydrogen fuel cells will take over, but I doubt it. I’d never want to return to going to filling stations if I got used to charging at home.

Personally I think the emissions benefits do stack up. But that’s coming from someone who lives in a country where we sometimes see over 60% of our electric needs generated from wind. We will no doubt (and are currently experiencing) growing pains we we try to expand our renewable electricity generation, but that will pass in time. Ireland has the potential to be a net energy exporter, if our government gets its act in order.

EIWT Weston, Ireland

Airborne_Again wrote:

word average

WORLD average. Peter, if you can take the time…

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden
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